“Back in the USSR we were behind the iron curtain. There was nowhere to run to, not Europe, not America. But we had this absolute belief that if we could just somehow make a tiny hole in the curtain and reach through it far enough to knock on the door of the United Nations and say Hey! It’s us, we’re here, the Crimean Tatars! This is what’s happening to us… then the world would listen, because right was on our side. We knew in the 1980s Soviet Union we could go to prison or be locked up in a psychiatric hospital; we could be sentenced to three years for just ‘thinking of harm to the Soviet Union’. But no one just disappeared forever, or was later found dead, like now in Crimea. There wasn’t this dread of vanishing, of being left with the terrible not-knowing. There wasn’t any fear of not being heard, if we could just make that little hole and reach through…

Now there is no iron curtain. We can reach out whenever we like to the United Nations, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and say Hey! Here we are, the Crimean Tatars, this is what’s happening to us… And it makes no difference. No one can or wants to do anything.”

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Five years ago today Reshat Ametov was buried in Crimea. His body had been found near a village called Wild Strawberry and another called Russian. He’d been tortured over ten days before being killed. Now around the anniversary of his death his last Facebook post pops up in my time-line, ghost-fashion: Going on Monday to the Cabinet of Ministers to stand in protest. Have you got the guts???

And the video keeps showing up. Shot in central Simferopol on that Monday, 3rd March 2014, it shows Reshat standing alone in front of Russian soldiers in unmarked uniform guarding the Crimean Cabinet of Ministers. Passersby, journalists and camouflage-clad members of the ‘Crimean self-defence’ mill around; police sirens wail. For over an hour, Reshat Ametov just stands there. He doesn’t say or do anything. He hasn’t even got a protest sign. Then some of the men in camouflage take him to a black car and drive him away.

The people who saw him alive after that, who are clearly visible in the film, and the people who killed him, have not been charged. It’s as if they didn’t do anything, just as Reshat didn’t do anything.

Reshat’s brother Refat talked to me once about Don Quixote when he described Reshat. Honestly, he sounds a bit impossible in ordinary, peaceful times, always picking up on obscure laws and regulations and trying to get them implemented because he was so sure he had the right, and this was the way the world should be. And when the times stopped being ordinary and peaceful, he went and stood there by the cabmin “because he was convinced he had a right to. Why didn’t he have a right to be there? He’d always had that right,” Refat said. “You know Don Quixote tilting at windmills. It was something like that.”

I never knew Reshat. I feel Refat is a bit quixotic though, the way he’s doggedly trying to bring those people who killed his brother to justice, after five years of nothing happening to further the investigation in Russian-ruled Crimea. Five years of the myth of the Crimean Spring when never a drop of blood was shed as Crimea ‘returned’ to Russia.

I think about Reshat and Refat whenever I see photos of single pickets, which is the only way people in Crimea can still register their protest (Russian bans any kind of group meeting or demonstration that isn’t in support of the authorities, and has detained people for having unsanctioned football matches or carrying ‘unsanctioned flying devices’ – otherwise known as balloons). A single picket is where you stand alone somewhere holding a sign saying, for example, Crimean Tatars are not extremists. Such picketers have been detained and fined; it is now apparently a extremist offence to say that you’re not an extremist.

Reshat Ametov didn’t even do that of course, he didn’t even have a sign.

You can read Don Quixote as comedy, as tragedy, as social commentary, as metafiction and even fake news – in book 2, (fictional) Quixote sets forth on new adventures in order to debunk a fake (real work of fiction by a rival author) Quixote.

You can read in it the wonderful, awful ability of people to create their own reality in the face of violence, ridicule, disbelief, historical memory, international law, common sense and facts on the ground.

You could call ‘Crimean Spring’ quixotic, in that sense. The adherents of Crimea Spring are fortunate though: all local information channels and most facts on the ground in Crimea do everything to confirm their reality, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.

For quixotic people like the Ametovs it’s harder. These are people desperately trying to live in one reality when everything around tells them they are living in another. There are lots of them in Crimea. Mostly they stay at home, talking to their families and to a dwindling circle of acquaintances they can trust. They’ve turned their backs on any kind of public, civic life, because there is no place for this in Crimea anymore. Their reality, where there is international law, where there are alternative narratives, where there is justice for the disappeared and the murdered, and simply the possibility to stand in silent protest, gets smaller and smaller.

I remember what a Crimean Tatar told me in 2015, back when he still thought he could play a public, civic role in Crimea. “If I say what I think they’ll put me in prison or exile me,” he said. “So I’ve learned to control not just my words, but my thoughts.”

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on a Crimean Tatar gate in Stariy Krym, Crimea. (Cervantes metafictionally alleged that the story of Don Quixote was originally written by the Muslim author Cide Hamete Benengeli).

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I was in Kerch this summer, in the east of Crimea. That was before the college shooting; before Ukrainian ships were fired on and arrested in the Kerch straits, triggering (more) talk of (more) war and imposition of martial law in half of Ukraine. The biggest news in town then was the Kerch bridge, built by Russia across the Kerch straits in a 200 billion rouble Fuck You to international law, and a scandal about the disappearance of a chunk of budget money that had been allocated to rebuild the derelict steps up Mithridates hill.

Kerch bridge fridge magnets for sale on Mithridates hill

I met two men, let’s call them Tolya and Ivan, who had worked on building the bridge, and earned themselves very nice wages thankyou. Tolya was absolutely opposed to Russian annexation; Ivan supported it.

Tolya’s world, and world view, had fallen apart in 2014. He couldn’t understand what was happening, how was it possible that Russia just came and took Crimea? What happened to justice, to fairness?

He had considered joining the Ukrainian army. He had considered emigrating, and even tried it for several months before concluding that life as a second class citizen in Europe was no solution.

grafitti on Mithridates hill

In Tolya I could see bewilderment and an almost self-mocking despair – it had been nearly five years already since annexation; it’s hard to keep up the principles, the pure overwhelming emotions, over all that time. He mentioned the soldiers and tanks in the streets in 2014, coming back to them again and again in our conversations. They had clearly been like a hole torn in his entire view of the world – the possibility that war might come into his life, literally, here in Kerch where he’d had a successful business providing fun activities for tourists.

He talked a lot about his grandfather, an army man who had been arrested for ‘anti-soviet activity’ (for complaining about lack of rations and arms) and during world war 2 was put in charge of a unit of convicts – cannon fodder in the most literal sense.

And Tolya talked about the Kerch bridge. How well it was built (he had seen the process close up), its spectacular dimensions, what it had brought to isolated Kerch. “A bridge is always a good thing, isn’t it?” he said. “A bridge joins things together, rather than separating them. It connects people, trade, ideas.”

Later Ivan took me out on a boat to see the bridge close up. Unlike Tolya, Ivan did not strike me as an introspective or romantic person. Everything in Russian Crimea was fantastic, including the bridge whose vital statistics he knew off by heart. Many people in Kerch mentioned the economic disaster that was the near-closure of the Kerch shipyard since 2014 when international shipping stopped; Vanya said cheerfully that it would soon be reopened and extended as a ‘strategic object’ – a military shipyard building warships.

In his late twenties, he wanted to be a commercial ship’s captain, travelling the world. I asked if he thought his Russian Crimean passport (not recognised by many countries issuing visas) might be a problem; he didn’t understand what I was talking about.

He was one of the few Crimeans I met who apparently had no doubts at all about Russian annexation being a good thing. A practical, active young man who did not remember the Soviet Union, his life ahead of him. I asked him what concrete benefits Russian rule had brought him. I thought at the very least he’d mention the high wages he’d earned building that bridge that connects, that divides.

He didn’t. He said, “Peace. It’s important to be confident that behind you stands a great power that is ready to fight for you.”

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Brexit thoughts: I’ve just come back from Warsaw, where I was attending a symposium on Ukraine at the College of Europe. It hit me at the airport of course, where I walked straight along the EU passport line while most other passengers off the plane from Ukraine shuffled along the winding ‘other passports’ queue. Soon I’ll be in that second line; ‘Take back control’ will have put me in line with the Ukrainians. (And if you think that sentence sounds offensive, I’m wondering if you voted for brexit).

The symposium was a truly European event where speakers switched effortlessly from Polish to French to Ukrainian to English to German – European in the best sense of the word: multilingual, tolerant, open-minded, interested, informed, outward-looking (and possibly just the tiniest bit smug). It was the anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. We met at the college’s beautiful campus in a former royal palace, while Crimeans were busy being forced to inform their employers or the administrations of their children’s schools that they had done the required and voted in the Russian presidential elections. Corbyn was busy saying yes it is Russia’s fault that there was a chemical weapons attack on British soil but no, we still shouldn’t jump to conclusions. A few more soldiers were busy dying in east Ukraine, a few more civilians on the frontline were busy shivering with no water and electricity as the snow fell again. The Russian state was busy lying as usual. A pilot falsely accused by Russian propaganda of shooting down MH17 committed suicide. We sat and talked about things that scare me, and I felt a part of this conversation but also not a part, because soon my country is not going to belong to this group that is already in Europe or that wants to be. Soon my country will not have the backing of 27 allied member states next time Russia decides to attack. We’ll be in that other, shuffling and winding line.

After the symposium I went to the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising. On display were cherished personal possessions donated by people who survived those two months of 1944 when the Polish Home Army took on, and were destroyed by, the German occupying forces while the Soviets watched from the other side the Vistula. Among the children’s dresses and PoW identifying tags and family photos and home-made medics’ armbands stained with seventy-year-old blood, there are British army uniforms worn by Poles from the Home Army trained in Britain.

The Warsaw uprising is not a beautiful and tragic and stirring story of heroism and alliance; the uprising was probably declared too early by the Polish government in exile, and Britain and the other allies didn’t do much to help, they were too concerned about agreement with Stalin while the British press followed Soviet propaganda (George Orwell wrote at the time that the media and left-wing intellectuals “know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the [exiled Polish] London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter […] Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not ‘Is this policy right or wrong?’ but ‘This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?’ And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power. The Russians are powerful in eastern Europe, we are not: therefore we must not oppose them. This involves the principle, of its nature alien to Socialism, that you must not protest against an evil which you cannot prevent.”)

But I felt so sad looking at those British uniforms, that had been preserved and treasured by their Polish owners and our allies, because they seemed to symbolise something that was good amid the horror of war, and which we are now wilfully losing. Now we are self-pityingly complaining about Poles and everyone else taking our jobs as we turn our backs on the peaceful alliance that is the EU, and Poles are turning their backs on democracy and rule of law that are the founding principles of the EU.

British army uniforms donated to the museum by Poles from the Home Army

The photos of Warsaw in 1945 look like Aleppo 2018. I walked back through the city centre along streets of rebuilt 18th century housing, rebuilt palaces, rebuilt churches; newer built blocks of flats and monuments, even newer shiny skyscrapers. Coffee shops; tourists; the obligatory band in Peruvian ponchos playing Leonard Cohen on panpipes… Absolutely everything in Warsaw is new, or new pretending to be old, and in a way it’s incredibly encouraging because it’s taken seventy years to do this. Just seventy years; less than a person’s lifetime, to completely rebuild a city. Maybe it’ll take less than that time to rebuild Aleppo. But you’ve still lost something forever. Someone, someone, a thousand, a million.

When World War 2 ended – I learned this after visiting the museum – the British were worried about the more than hundred thousand Poles who had come over as part of the Polish government in exile and Army in the West. There was concern they would take British jobs. At least they were not sent back to Soviet-controlled Poland, where Home Army members were executed or put into prison camps.

These days, Poles are among the most vociferously opposed in the EU to letting in Syrians or refugees from any other destroyed country that might resemble their own seventy years ago. Poland often justifies this refusal by saying it has already let in over a million Ukrainians (as workers, not as refugees from annexed Crimea or the warzone in east Ukraine). More than 50 percent of foreign students and 60 percent of foreign workers in Poland are from Ukraine. These are the people who should have a fast track at Warsaw airport, not me.

Yet at the same time Poland is waging a self-pitying memory war with Ukraine, over atrocities committed against Poles in World War 2 while Britain was providing Poles with training and army uniforms and signing agreements with Stalin to divide up their country. Brexit is a memory war about the control Britain supposedly had back then, under Churchill who signed that agreement.

History; memory; all of this: airports and passport queues, European colleges in rebuilt aristocrat’s palaces, museums and coffee and croissants and multi-lingual debates and nationalist marches and annexation and wars by proxy and refugees in tents and International Humanitarian Law and the EU and brexit, to have come out of the history of total devastation of World War 2. All this in just 70 years. So much was built and rebuilt and yet we all ended up being victims – of immigration, of Brussels technocrats, of historical massacres, of faceless international corporations, of NATO, of conspiracy theories. We got lost in pitying ourselves, and we forgot pity.

And tonight, 25-26 May, is three years since Andrey Yudenko died in Feodosia, Crimea. Andrey was a son, a brother, a one-time sportsman, a gentle, home-loving soul – and a drug user. He died because Russia stopped the substitution therapy programme he was on when it annexed Crimea. Andrey died five days after he received his last dose of methadone.

One of the many things his mother Olga told me, which never made it into this story I wrote, was:

“I’ve never been abroad, but I’ve heard that in Europe more attention is paid to the unprotected sectors of society. Here, they’re just the things you throw out. We’re such a long way from thinking about people.”

Europe is far from perfect in social protection, just as substitution therapy is far from the ideal answer to drug-related harm. But Olga’s son Andrey was a person, not a thing to be thoughtlessly thrown out along with Crimea’s substitution therapy programme in 2014.

Here is another, longer piece explaining Russia’s ideological opposition to methadone, and telling the stories of the Crimea programme’s fatalities, and its survivors like Ruslan.

I asked Ruslan why he’d agreed to meet me in Crimea, where any positive mention of substitution therapy is pretty much considered ‘extremist’ – as he had already discovered to his cost.

One of his answers is in the text; the other was “It’s good to talk to people from a lighter world.” Crimea is indeed a very dark place now for Ruslan.

Good news coming out of Russian-annexed Crimea is very relative, and even more short-lived.

On 25 January there was some good news from Crimea. Relatively. The Kyiv district court in Simferopol refused to extend the pre-trial prison term of Redvan Suleimanov, arrested in July 2016 on very unconvincing charges of sabotage. He would have to be released by the end of January because the investigation had failed to provide materials within the required seven days of the previous detention term’s expiry.

So you understand why this is good news in Crimea these days: under a regime which makes it abundantly clear that anyone can be arrested and sentenced, regardless of any truth of what they did or didn’t do, no one arrested on politicised charges of extremism or terrorism or sabotage or mass unrest has been found innocent. No one, once taken into pre-trial detention on these charges, has been released on bail or even house arrest. Around twenty people accused of such offences have been held in the horrible conditions of pre-trial prison for a year or more. They have not been allowed visits from their families. Two have been removed to prison in Moscow. The family of another Ukrainian arrested for sabotage in November didn’t know which prison he was in at all for over a month after he was arrested.

Suleimanov’s lawyer Emil Kurbedinov, who represents the majority of Crimean Tatars arrested in Crimea for ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’, reported the good news about his client on social media. On 26 January, the next day, he reported a house search by the FSB (Russian security services) of another Crimean Tatar activist.

On his way to the house, and while his own house was also being searched, Kurbedinov was arrested himself. He was charged with ‘public display or propaganda of banned symbols’, for a post on social media from 2012-13 (long before Russia annexed Crimea), and sentenced to ten days administrative arrest.

So relative is good news in Crimea these days, where anyone can be sentenced for anything, this honestly felt like a kind of good news. It is awful news, the arrest of the most prominent lawyer (out of a very small group) defending Crimean Tatars and others. But – only ten days. Only administrative. It could have been so much worse.

Friends laughed at my naivety over this, and in welcoming the news about Suleimanov just the day before. Rightly. On 27 January, the same Kyiv district court in Simferopol heard Suleimanov’s case again. Kurbedinov of course, was not there to represent him. In his absence, the court extended Suleimanov’s pre-trial prison term.

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It’s Reshat Ametov’s birthday today. He’d be 42. He was abducted and killed in Crimea in 2014, and this video clip shows the people who, to a greater or lesser extent, colluded in his murder. We don’t know to what extent, because despite the evidence of this video, they’ve never been put on trial for his abduction. No one has. The case is indefinitely on hold.

The cameraman featured in this film has also never come forward. If he’s still in Crimea, I’m not sure I can entirely blame him; he’d probably end up standing trial himself for ‘inciting mass unrest’ or ‘attempting to overthrow the Russian government by force’. This is not a joke. Since I wrote about the Ametovs in 2015, several people in Crimea face precisely these charges with far less ‘evidence’ against them than even a video showing them filming something that should not be filmed.

Below is a piece I published in June 2015 about the Ametovs and the film. it’s no longer available online so I’m sharing it here. It looks oddly naive now; only three cases of obvious miscarriages of justice?

Perhaps that cameraman will read it…

I never knew Reshat Ametov. I know his brother Refat, and can’t help thinking that his description of Reshat as a tilter at windmills applies just as well to himself.

Over the last year, Refat Ametov has spent uncountable hours obsessively watching and re-watching the same clips of video footage.

Shot in Crimea on March 3 2014, they show his younger brother, Reshat, standing in front of soldiers in unmarked uniform guarding the Crimean Cabinet of Ministers in Lenin square, central Simferopol. Passersby, journalists and men in camouflage and with red armbands mill around the square; police sirens sound in the background. For over an hour, Reshat Ametov just stands there. Then some of the men in camouflage take his arms and lead him to a black car that has just driven up, and he is not there anymore.

This video footage is the last time Refat can see his brother alive. Reshat, 39, a Crimean Tatar father of three who had been making a solitary, silent protest against the Russian occupation of Crimea, was found brutally murdered almost two weeks later, on the eve of a referendum on Crimea joining the Russian Federation.

Now Refat hopes clues in the footage could help find the killers of his brother, who international human rights organisations call the first victim of the Russian annexation.

Russian soldiers in unmarked uniform had just taken over government buildings throughout the peninsula on February 27 2014. Calls for unification with Russia were opposed by the peninsula’s indigenous Muslim people the Crimean Tatars, but any organised opposition was threatened by rapidly-formed brigades of locals and people from Russia, calling themselves Crimean people’s self defence militias. These are the men in camouflage or with red armbands clearly seen in the March 3 video footage, who take Reshat and drive away with him in the car. His body was found 60 km away, near the village of Zemlyanichnoe in Belogorsk region, on March 15.

Over a year after Russian annexation, no one has been charged over Reshat’s kidnapping and death. Despite the evidence of the video footage, much of which went out live on the Crimean Tatar TV channel ATR, Crimean government head Sergei Aksyonov announced he was confident the self defence militias were not involved. Authorities opened a case into murder but not abduction, and suspended the investigation in November 2014, officially because they can’t find a suspect. The story has completely dropped out of Russian and Crimean media – where independent outlets, including ATR, have been raided and shut down.

“Crimean mass media won’t cover it in principle, and people from civil society organisations or the authorities won’t touch this case, because it’s a hundred percent lost,” Refat said from his home near Simferopol. “The people who did this serve Russia.”

Yet Refat, who before the annexation worked as an electrician, has not given up. He has been hunting out more evidence in a one-man investigation he hopes will finally bring his brother’s kidnappers, torturers and killers to justice.

“You have to know what they did to my brother,” he said. The evidence he has collected includes hard-to-view photographs from the post-mortem showing the multiple injuries Reshat suffered. “He was tortured over ten days. They stuck a spike through his forehead to kill and get rid of him. Before that he was alive, through all of what they did…When people know that, they feel something different, right?”

When, on March 5, a friend alerted him to the video showing his brother’s abduction, Refat first sent his and Reshat’s family to safe locations. He found out which division of the self defence militia had been on guard on Lenin Square that day, and found their headquarters. “I was there, and Reshat was [taken] there too, I guess,” he said. “I asked them for help, and they actually tried to help me, they were just simple, local guys.” The militia members he met offered to look for Reshat among the prisoners being held in basements around the city. They claimed to find nothing.

Refat tried to track down people visible in the video footage who might be able to offer evidence or clues. The footage shows several journalists at the scene. In particular a cameraman, visible only from the back, follows the group with Reshat to the car, apparently filming his abductors close up. Finally Refat’s obsessive searching turned up another shot in which this cameraman’s face, and that of another journalist working with him, is visible.

In 2015 the British TV documentary series Unreported World produced a short film to try to uncover these journalists’ identities. The film resulted in one lead to a Spanish journalist, which however turned out to be false.

Refat and the family’s lawyer Emil Kurbedinov believe new evidence these journalists may possess could help reopen a case. Because the investigation was into murder, instead of murder with abduction (a category in Russian law) the three individuals seen in the existing footage taking Reshat away are legally considered witnesses and not suspects.

“The investigator couldn’t get anywhere near them,” Refat said. “There were some kind of people and that’s all; they were there and then they weren’t; it’s a fairytale of course, like the car was there and then it wasn’t.”

“It ends up that they didn’t abduct [Reshat], except that’s absurd,” he added.

Olya Skrypnyk, deputy head of the Crimean Human Rights Field Mission, said that a separate investigation into abduction should have been opened. “We know there are people who are in the video, and we know the investigator says they are members of the self defence who are responsible for keeping public order, and so they decided to temporarily remove [Reshat]. But the case contents show that it’s abduction,” she said.

Skrypnyk said the murder investigation procedure should also have treated the three men from the self defence militia as participants or accessories, leaving the court to decide on their degree of involvement. “But the investigation never even reaches this point,” she said. “The investigation is protecting the suspects. They will never come to court even if a murder suspect is found.”

Possible new evidence from the cameraman shown filming could change that. “Then we’d really be able to see who did it, and that they are abductors,” said Refat.

He and Kurbedinov both called on the journalists to come forward. “Why do they keep silent, where are those video files?” asked Kurbedinov. “They should carry out their professional duty and produce these recordings.”

The Ametov case, according to Skrypnyk, is one of three major cases in post-annexation Crimea showing manipulation of evidence and procedure (the others concern the murder of Ukrainian army officer Stanislav Karachevsky in April 2014, and the trial of Aleksandr Kostenko, a pro-Ukrainian activist charged with injuring a riot policeman in Kyiv in February 2014). Meanwhile numerous international human rights organisations have issued damning reports of human rights violations in Crimea since Russian annexation.

Many of the violations, which include house searches, detentions and charges of ‘extremism’, and disappearances, are directed against Crimean Tatars, who make up about 12 percent of the Crimean population and who largely boycotted the March 2014 referendum to join Russia. This entire ethnic group was deported in 1944 just after the Soviet Red Army had liberated Crimea from German occupation; the deportation and next few years in exile wiped out an estimated 46 percent of the nation. Refat and Reshat Ametov’s grandfather was a decorated Red Army reconnaissance officer who went into exile with his family, and Refat and Reshat were born in central Asia.

The Crimean Tatars were allowed to come back from the late 1980s, but faced many challenges to resettling. Before March 2014 Reshat had belonged to a working group which promoted Crimean Tatar rights in Crimea. He had been pushing the local village council to implement a Ukrainian decree which granted Muslims a separate plot for burials.

“He wasn’t involved in politics, but he really cared about things,” said Refat. “He never wanted to fight; he always wanted to do everything by law.”

Reshat had told his brother about his plan to protest the Russian occupation. “I understood how dangerous it was; I said no, it’s too late,” his brother recalled.

On Friday February 28 2014 Reshat put a post on his facebook page: ‘Going on Monday to the Cabinet of Ministers to stand in protest. Have you got the guts???’

That was his verdict and his death sentence, says Refat. “He understood that there was no support anywhere. He wrote his last phrase, and went.”

Refat believes his brother’s silent one-man protest, which he carried out as soon as Lenin square was opened again after several days of complete closure, was motivated by his desire to see legal justice done. “I’m sure he stood there just because he was convinced he had a right to. Why didn’t he have a right to be there? He’d always had that right, on any day…”

Refat repeatedly returns to his brother’s love of justice and his solitary action, with the same obsessiveness with which he has watched those hours of footage showing Reshat in front of the soldiers before he is taken away. “Only my brother took action. He was alone, the only one who went out,” he said. “They say Don Quixote fought with windmills. It was something like that. And in reality, no one else did it except him.”

While Russian media dubbed the Russian soldiers who took over the peninsula ‘polite people’, human rights reports single out the self defence militias for especial censure. According to the Crimean Human Rights Field Mission, since March 2014 they have been involved in the abduction, harassment and torture of Crimean Tatars, journalists and 20 Ukrainian activists; attacks on non-Moscow Patriarchy Orthodox churches; searches of mosques and madrassas, and raids on commercial buildings and businesses.

The Field Mission notes evidence of force in the disappearance of at least nine other people in Crimea since March 2014. In two cases, witnesses saw the men – Crimean Tatars – being forced into vehicles and driven away by people in uniform. None of these cases have been solved.

Meanwhile the Russian-backed Crimean authorities have proposed several laws and amendments to legalise the self defence militias and exempt their actions from liability. The militias now have the status of a state public institution, in practice directly subordinate to Crimean head Sergei Aksyonov, who has distributed medals and certificates for ‘faithful performance of duty in protecting public order’.

“For over a year, not a single member of the self defence has been called to account for anything,” said Skrypnyk. “Instead, they receive thanks and awards.”

Skrypnyk, from Crimea but now based in Kyiv, says that monitoring human rights on the peninsula, which she calls “a theatre of the absurd,” is increasingly difficult. “When we’re asked to give any kind of evaluation of the situation as lawyers or human rights activists we can’t, because it’s outside of any recognisable human rights framework,” she said. “It’s outside the framework of any kind of legislation, it’s outside even Russian legislation.”

In this context, Refat Ametov’s dogged pursuit of justice can seem as Quixotic as his brother’s one-man protest. He and Kurbedinov are currently waiting to be granted access to the suspended investigation files, which number thousands of pages. “I’ve already lost a year. I haven’t been earning anything; I don’t know what I’m living on,” Refat said, when asked how he found time for his investigation.

But he has no thoughts of giving up, wherever the investigation leads. “It’ll be deeper and more difficult information; it’s hard for me to even think about it,” he said. “But whatever I find out can’t be any more terrible. I just don’t know what I’ll do with what I find out. I don’t know what will happen then.”